Who Are The Best NBN Providers?

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The NBN's coming to my street soon and I'd like to get some idea who the best providers are - not so much in terms of bang for your buck (I can survey that landscape pretty well myself), but in terms of customer service quality.

See, I realize that most of the faults with the NBN are NBNCo's responsibility, so in that regard, the choice of provider is somewhat arbitrary, seeing as how the hardware leading into my house is the same either way. But say I do have problems, which providers have the customer service depts. that are easiest to get along with and get results the fastest?

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I went with iiNet purely because of their customer service. They are about the same pricewise as most of the others but they have been great as far as service goes. Switched from Telstra after some appalling customer service issues there.

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Yeah uh I've had pretty awful customer service from iinet since they were bought out. I'd say I had better followup on issues when I was on Telstra, years ago.

Also, while some issues with the NBN are the responsibility of NBNCo, a lot of other issues that aren't related to the physical connectivity layer are very much on the RSP's doorstep, as far as congestion and how much bandwidth they're paying for to your POP, and overseas links.

I liked that they told you outright, "Our call center is in Sri Lanka, here's a photo of our staff, by name, so you know who you're talking to"

and all their support staff are Network Engineer qualified, which is nice.

Or at least, was 2 years ago.

I once called up, and My first sentence was literally;

"Hi, I have two questions, I'm seeing terrible latency to Asia Pacific servers, and my line speed seems to be woeful compared to my achievable SNR. Do you have an Alternate route you could apply to Asia Pacific? Also, can you lock my ADSL down to 9db SNR so I can do quality tweaking from my Billion Routers end?"

"Of course sir, one moment......... OK I have a custom route in place that should help, and your expected SNR has been adjusted, anything else?"

"UH...... no.... thank you!"

Never had a better ISP honestly.

Their billing is a little 'sketchy' in that they have a hard time reversing accidental 'double bills' when you FIRST sign up, but minor quibble really IMO.

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You're right that the CVC/AVC price structure is still hurting the NBN for small players, you're going to have a nicer time (especially during evenings) with larger ISPs like iiNet, Internode, and AAPT for the time being.

They restructured the pricing in December, but the feeling I get from talking to people is that this hasn't trickled down yet.

Also look at MyRepublic. They're a large player from Singapore, and have a cheaper price tier if you're OK with being behind carrier NAT (reduces the number of IPs they have to pay for). The customer service is pretty barebones though, so might not be what you're after.

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You're right that the CVC/AVC price structure is still hurting the NBN for small players, you're going to have a nicer time (especially during evenings) with larger ISPs like iiNet, Internode, and AAPT for the time being.

They restructured the pricing in December, but the feeling I get from talking to people is that this hasn't trickled down yet.

Also look at MyRepublic. They're a large player from Singapore, and have a cheaper price tier if you're OK with being behind carrier NAT (reduces the number of IPs they have to pay for). The customer service is pretty barebones though, so might not be what you're after.

I haven't looked into it; but does Carrier NAT add some security through obscurity?

And does that mean having NAT on your home router would then put you in a Double NAT environment?

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So for better or worse we be going with internode. want to do a landline with them too.

... it will mean the end to decades of telstra landline for us

When we got NBN we dropped the Telstra land line, it wasn't required as we run VOIP over the NBN.

As we don't officially become NBN'd till the 5th, Telstra still here, but VOIP in operation already thanks to internode's service. The whole thing seems like a good deal to me, keeping a positive spin on things at this stage. I / we've been a Telstra customer for close to three decades. o_0

Since iiNet got Internode, their AGILE network for direct routing IIRC is uses exclusively by Internode and iiNet customers.

Meanwhile TPG still run their giant proxy, to my knowledge.

To most geeks, this is horrid, because we want "LIVE" internet, not Internet from a few minutes ago; however to the casual end user, this is GREAT because NBN slowdowns are MUCH less significant.

This is fairly old knowledge from the days when the merger first happened, so don't take the above as gospel.

The giant proxy isn't an issue if you connect to a VPN - that is, unless you pick a VPN provider (or set up your own) that also uses such a proxy. VPNs will also encrypt your traffic and as such, will give you better privacy and allow you to bypass geoblocking and DNS blocking (if correctly configured). Just be careful about which provider you pick, where they are based and their log policy. A mate of a mate uses ExpressVPN to watch overseas Netflix and to hide torrent traffic and I hear that they are pretty decent - they offer heaps of server locations and have a kill switch so if the VPN goes down, so does network access - this prevents inadvertent disclosure of one's true IP and location.

Anyway, I digress. In terms of ISPs, we have been with TPG for a while and got our NBN through them. We had some issues with the lines from the node and initially TPG kept trying to tell us that it was an internal wiring (read: our) problem. However, when we got rid of the internal wiring and connected the modem straight onto the network boundary, most of the problems were fixed in a reasonably timely fashion. Plus the TPG technician that came to our house was pretty knowledgeable and thankgully did not treat me like an idiot who knows nothing about technology. Finally, I have never been on hold to them for more than a few minutes - I have had some horribly long hold times with other providers. So they aren't too bad. Just be aware that if you use torrents, though (for downloading open source stuff legitimately, of course ), you may get shaped. That's where a VPN comes in handy - because all your traffic is encapsulated in encrypted packets, your ISP can't tell what it is.